A Baltimore broadcast conglomerate on a $2 billion buying spree can add KVII-TV in Amarillo to its portfolio with Wednesday’s blessing by the Federal Communications Commission.

The agency green-lighted Sinclair Broadcast Group’s $370 million purchase of 18 stations, including KVII, owned by Barrington Broadcasting Group of Schamburg, Ill.

Under the deal, Sinclair also will take over providing sales services to another six stations that have been served by Barrington. KVII-TV President and CEO Thom Pritz declined comment, and Sinclair Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer David Amy did not immediately return a call for comment.

A timeline for closing the Sinclair deal with Barrington is unknown, said Linda Kious, assistant to Barrington CEO Jim Yager. She declined further comment.

The FCC approved assignment of the Barrington station licenses to Sinclair on Monday, according to the agency’s website.

Sinclair, a publicly traded company, has announced or closed purchases worth at least $2 billion this year, said Barry Lucas, a senior vice president of research at Gabelli & Co. in Rye, N.Y. Gameco Investors Inc., a Gabelli affiliate, owns shares of Sinclair and other media companies, but Lucas does not.

Sinclair has, in recent months, closed deals to buy television stations from Titan Television Broadcast Group in Atlanta, Cox Media group and Seattle-based Fisher Communications, and announced the proposed acquisitions of Barrington and stations from Pennsylvania’s New Age Media, according to Sinclair.

Also yet to close is its largest deal this year, a nearly $1 billion offer for eight stations from Virginia-based Allbritton Communications Co. stations — two in the Washington, D.C., market. The companies last month provided additional information requested by the Department of Justice, which is conducting an antitrust review of the proposal.

“(Sinclair has) just been on a tear, buying,” said Al Tompkins, a senior Poynter Institute faculty member with more than 40 years of broadcasting experience. “They’ve bought a lot of stations, including some really nice stations in larger markets.

“They used to be concentrating in smaller or medium markets. They now have, or will soon have in their portfolio, some very good stations in some really nice markets.”

When all its purchases in the works this year close, Sinclair will own, operate, program or provide sales services to 163 television stations in 77 markets, its website shows.

An August Pew Journalism Research Project report called local TV stations hot commodities, quoting an unnamed analyst as saying the business is in “a renaissance.”

Consolidation has been driven by several factors, including the resurgence of auto sales and, therefore, advertising, and the return of available financial credit since the recession, Lucas said.

Retransmission fees are a “huge deal for local stations,” Tompkins said. “Ten years ago, retransmission would have amounted to a blip on their radar, and now it’s a significant amount of their income.”

The Sinclair television group will reach an estimated 39 percent of the television households in the United States, its website said. Stations in the group are affiliated with all major networks.

Sinclair has weathered scrutiny for the legal but controversial ownership of more than one station in some markets. Some of that overlap comes through FCC-allowed side agreements that let a company owning one station in a market provide shared services — shared staff, equipment or back-office operations — of other stations in the same market, Lucas said.

“Media consolidation is always an issue in this country,” Lucas said. “People are concerned that one person will have too big a voice. That’s been an issue from the time Marconi invented the radio.”

Sinclair also has been criticized for using stations to press political stances.

The company ordered stations to air a documentary critical of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry near the 2004 election, but stations actually aired excerpts of both that documentary and a pro-Kerry documentary, along with Vietnam veteran interviews, according to an April Seattle Times report.

The Federal Elections Commission found the broadcast did not violate the federal election campaign act, according to a July 2005 Sinclair news release.

Also in 2004, Sinclair ordered its ABC affiliates to preempt “Nightline” when an entire broadcast was devoted to the reading of the names of troops killed in Iraq and showing their photographs, according to an April 29, 2004, Bloomberg report.

The show “appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq,” a faxed Sinclair statement said, according to Bloomberg. At the time, Sinclair owned 62 U.S. television stations.

Sen. John McCain wrote a letter to Sinclair President and CEO David Smith calling the decision unpatriotic and a disservice to the public and the U.S. armed forces, CNN reported.

Tompkins said he led a training workshop for Sinclair journalists in Ohio last summer and “didn’t hear any of that political stuff that they’ve been painted with.

“I got no scent at all that they had a political agenda. If they do, it certainly did not come out that day.”

Sinclair reported net broadcast revenues of $835.2 million for the nine months that ended Sept. 30, up 31.8 percent from the previous year.

Debt on the company’s balance sheet was $2.25 billion at Sept. 30, compared with a net debt of $1.9 billion at June 30.

For the full 2013 fiscal year, Sinclair expects net broadcasting revenues of $1.2 billion, an increase of more than 30 percent from the previous year, according to the earnings report. Sinclair anticipates its acquisitions will account for $313.2 million of the net earnings.

Sinclair announced its proposed purchase of the Barrington stations last spring. The deal includes KVIH-TV in Clovis, N.M., which carries the programming of KVII, according to the Amarillo station’s website.

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If you're in the media or around it, it's been very hard to stomach the look inside the KVII building in the past few years. When Stanley Marsh built and owned KVII, his "spaceship" building was always in top notch condition. Not only that, but he made sure they had the latest equipment, vehicles that weren't run down and all matched with the same logo and color, and it was so obvious he was very proud of what Channel 7 had become.

Since he sold it, there's been at least one owner before Barrington, and neither wanted to put the money into it to keep what Marsh had started. They were in it for the money.

I've been attached to Amarillo television for many years, although with another station, but I don't think anyone who's been in the media from the Stanley Marsh era would disagree with me. It's a shame and I hope the Marsh family hasn't seen how downtrodden that famous "spaceship" has become.

Please Sinclair, put money back into this great building and let it be the icon we all remember.

Stanly may have had invested in great equipment and so on....but he didn't give a damn how the employee's were treated by the managing little toad "John Tyler". You could hear him screaming from the second floor at times, (whenever he wasn't having an affair with his secretary). True KVII was in it's golden era, but it came at a heavy cost to the employee's. If you were a news anchor you were treated ok, but everyone else was treated like dirt, screamed at constantly and worked in fear. I doubt if KVII will ever see another "golden era"...the talent just doesn't exist anymore. Hopefully the new owners WILL invest money and get it back to a professional station of some type.